VICTORAY SAWA No. 2

The Viper is just outside the room, just around the corner, I know, but I cannot face him, becuase he took my parents. This hotel room, with red velveted carpets, is where we stay, is where the mantels are adorned with photos of my parents and me, smiling, surrounded by falling orange leaves, by black umbrellas in grey city rain. But my parents, of course, are gone. They were gone when I came back from my walk. The Viper, Victoray Sawa took them.


I leave the room and turn the corner, and The Viper Victoray Sawa stands before me. He is two heads taller than I am. His right arm, right leg, and the whole right half of his body are the palest paper white. His left arm, his left leg, and the whole left half of his body are the darkest colorless black. He stands, in the shape of a sumotori, legs bent at the knee and hands on his thighs. His face, half white and half black, looks at me with closed eyes, his mouth locked in a snarling frown as on a dark samurai mask. In this way he stands, his cold malevolent stare painful to my eyes.

The Viper Victoray Sawa opens his mouth and a dark liquid spews forth in bursts, burning my flesh. I cannot scream, and I cannot move. I am afraid yet I feel no fear, for Victoray Sawa has taken me too, and I can never go home.

VICTORAY SAWA No. 1

A dark figure flickered across B. Harrington's field of view as he lay awake in bed. He began to shift and stir in place, with a silent resignation more than an acute fear. Young B. knew exactly what would happen, now that the lights were out. The dark figure would creep in through the crack underneath the door, the crack that let in traces of light and faint echoes of adult conversation. The light, and the sounds, came alive beneath his door. On the wall next to his bed, there was a chip in the offwhite paint, about the size of his young palm, that hovered silently near his head as he lay. In the daytime the chipped paint would gaze across the room silently and coldly, and watch B. as he drew comics and built block castles. At night, though, the dark figure would glide across his floor, and up the wall, and into the chipped paint, and in that instant, the palm-sized spot would begin to smile a dark smile at young B. He would know he can't move and he would know he can't show his fear. He would know he can't sleep. Victoray Sawa watches young B. and he knows that if he falls asleep then Victoray Sawa will get him.

Part Deux